~ I do have a side project!

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About

I’m flattered that you’re curious about who I am. Thank you!

First, let’s get the question of my name out of the way: Lisabeth. I grew up being called “Lisa.” This led to a disagreement between me and my parents about how to pronounce my full name. I favor the (to me) obvious “Lisab-EH-th” with a firm, short-e sound. They, however, favor a softer schwa sound at the end: “Lisab-UH-th.” I told them they have no standing since they didn’t bother to use my full name in childhood and still don’t use it. Sometimes, I dream about going back to simply being “Lisa” and leaving it all behind me.

I’ve lived in the Seattle area all my life (hello, Federal Way!). I currently live in Seattle proper with my husband and two children. We share our home with two cats, Roy and Iver. The urban chickens, of course, do NOT get to live in the house, though we’ve seen them eye the house and wonder why they get the crappy coop instead of the nice one.

I’m a second-generation programmer and grew up with a bookcase full of ANSI SQL and Honeywell manuals that I couldn’t understand. I started coding in BASIC and Logo as a child on our Coleco Adam and got serious as a young adult somewhere in the mid-to-late nineties. During, prior to, and after college, I’ve worked as a C# .NET web application developer, though I got my start first in Perl, then in classic ASP.

While I’m not by nature an enthusiast (I’m more of a generalist), there are a lot of simple things I enjoy and when I look at the list, I’m pleased to say that my first thought is, “Wow! It’s cool that I’ve still got enough time to dabble in all this!” with life being as full as it is with the family (I calculate that I have about an hour and a half of free time in an average day):

Perhaps more telling are the things I’ve never have gotten around to doing or doing well:

knitting (my skill ends at scarves)

speaking a foreign language fluently

traveling globally, especially to off-the-tourist-map spots that I get Postcrossing cards from

gardening (I just have a hard time believing in the necessity of watering plants that survived for millions of years before garden hoses were invented…and some of those weeds are pretty cool-looking, why would you turn away a volunteer?)

playing a musical instrument (though listening to my son play saxophone gives me vicarious pride)

There’s more to me than this–subtleties that you just can’t or shouldn’t put on the page, but it’s a pretty good sampling and gives a rough armature of who I am as a person. Whether I’m polite or rude, well-spoken and erudite or down-to-earth or all three…these things don’t come across well and will remain, I believe, a mystery because even when you try to write the truth, there’s always an element of artifice as you translate to the page.